Beastie Boys baking sessions will never be the same again…

What a sad day

Ceci Est Une Tarte Au Citron

 

Bonjour Papa!

Bonjour Nicole!

I’m not one to gorge on desserts or sweets, but I ♥ lemon tart.  It is the perfect combination of sweet and sharp.  It’s light and delicate, fresh and bright yellow and pastryish, and I think it may be the best thing that ever came from France.  Well… apart from saucisson, camembert, all those amazing chefs, and Daft Punk.

I’ve tried to find the perfect recipe for so long, and so far, this is it!  Quelle surprise, the filling is from a Heston Blumenthal recipe!

Bonjour tarte au citron!

Tarte au Citron

For the Pastry

230g plain flour

20g icing sugar

125g butter

1 large egg

1 tsp caster sugar

1/2 tsp fine salt

40ml cold water

Directions

1. Sift the flour and icing sugar into bowl and make a well in the centre.
2. Put the butter, egg, caster sugar and salt in the middle and rub into the flour to make breadcrumbs.
3. Add the water, a little at a time, until the dough begins to hold together.
4. Knead lightly (so as not to create too much gluten but to bring it all together nicely).  Chill in a plastic bag/cling film for at least 30 minutes.  Preheat oven to 180c.
5. Roll out the dough and fit into a 20cm tart/flan tray.  Place greaseproof paper and fill with baking stones or coins and place in oven.
6. After 10 minutes, remove the greaseproof paper and weights, and bake for another 5 minutes or so, until the pastry is cooked.

For the Lemon Filling (ripped off from Heston)

Finely grated zest and juice of 5 lemons

300ml double cream

390g white caster sugar

9 large eggs

1 large egg yolk

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 120c.  I know.  Raging inferno.
2. Put everything into a bowl and mix.  The trick is to get all the ingredients mixed together without creating too many bubbles.  Use a spatula or a wooden spoon or summink like that.
3. Now put the bowl over a pan of boiling water, put in a thermometer, and heat it until it reaches 60c.  If you are not fabulously well-equipped in the kitchen department and don’t have a sugar thermometer or digital probe or some sort of crazy infrared laser thingy, then I would say that 60 degrees feels like when you get in the bath too quickly and then have to jump out again because it’s way too hot.  Or more realistically, and as a non-tea/coffee drinker, I reckon it is probably the average tea/coffee drinking temperature.  Unless you are insanely hardcore or insanely not hardcore.  I think I will make a quick-reference temperature chart for easier explanation.
4. Strain the mixture into a jug.  If you are me, you will then probably throw in a whole load more finely grated lemon rind.
5. Now to assemble the tart:  Place the pastry case still in its tray onto a larger flat baking tray.  Pour the filling into the pastry case until it’s about 3/4 full.  Now put it into the oven and keeping it steady by rolling it out on the shelf, fill up the case with more filling.  Sounds like gobbledygook to me.
6. Bake for approximately 25 minutes until the filling is jiggly but solid.  Specifically check the centre of the tart as it will be the last part to cook through.

Leave to cool and set properly and then it’s ready to serve.  I like it with a dusting of icing sugar and a dollop of creme fraiche, but you can pimp it with dark chocolate, or sprinkle on a little sugar and blowtorch it, or cover with meringue and lemon meringue pie it up.  I bet that would really annoy the French.

Tags: dessert, heston blumenthal

Is Fudge Cool?

I don’t think it is.  But this is nice.  This recipe made me smile, although I’m not sure if it’s because it is interesting and tasty, or if it’s because it’s so face-contortingly sweet.  Either way, I made some last night and it’s all gone.

I was on a catering college field trip to Borough Market last year, when I first discovered cocoa nibs.  A by-product of chocolate making, they are bits of roasted cocoa bean, rich, bitter and crunchy and not dissimilar to munching on roasted coffee beans.  They are also packed with a chemical compound called theobromine – a member of the methylxanthine class of compounds.  In normal human being speak, the methylpoxy..athy…whatever class also includes caffeine, and so cocoa nibs are great because it is always novel to get wired on new stimulants, innit!?

Anyway, they are not the easiest things to get hold of, and cost a small fortune if you buy them from specialist chocolate shops, but are very reasonable if bought in bulk online.  The last load I ordered from Amazon will probably last me forever because I haven’t quite figured out what to do with them all.  I tried mixing a large handful into a batch of coconut ice cream I made a while ago.  I think they are perfect for things like ice cream because they keep their crunch.  The quest for cocoa nibs recipes will continue, but the recipe below is probably the best one I have found so far.

For very fast-acting energy-boosting action, look no further than this sea salt and cocoa nib fudge I swiped from the delightful London Bakes blog.  It is guaranteed to have you bouncing off walls, but you should probably book an appointment with your dentist in advance.

Sea Salt and Cocoa Nib Fudge

Ingredients

397g can of condensed milk

150ml milk

450g demerara sugaer

115g unsalted butter

1 + 1/2 teaspoon sea salt

40g cacao nibs

Directions

1. Line a 20cm square baking tin with parchment paper and grease well.
2. In a small saucepan, heat the condensed milk, milk, sugar and butter over a low heat, stirring constantly, until until the sugar has dissolved.
3. Bring to the boil and simmer for 10-15 minutes until the mixture reaches 115C/240F or the mixture forms a soft ball when dropped in a bowl of ice water.
4. Take off the heat, add 1 teaspoon of sea salt and beat until thick and grainy.
5. Stir in the cacao nibs, reserving some to sprinkle on top.
6. Pour the mixture into the pan, sprinkle with the 1/2 teaspoon of salt and the remaining cacao nibs and allow to cool at room temperature until solid. Cut into pieces.

It’s not as controversial as Marmite Fudge, but it still has the weirdness of salt.  Win!

 

Excuses Excuses…

Hmmmm it turns out I am not a natural at this blogging lark.  It seems like every day I receive notifications of new blog posts by the few people I follow – how do you get to be so prolific when you are obviously always insanely busy, Happiness Stan? – and I feel pangs of guilt for not doing my own.  But I’ve been busy and I guess I am inherently lazy too.

I have had a few adventures recently. I worked on another film set a few weeks ago, which I suspect may have been one of those dirty ones posing as something more artistic, but in terms of the catering I think it went really well – I stayed up all night rolling sushi for 40 people one night which helped me to hone my skills.  I got loads of tips on sushi making from my very un-Japanese friend Pascal who had just done a course, and will eventually write a post about what I learned from him later.

I’ve also been doing some cool stuff exploring the whole nose-to-tail eating, St. John vibe, so always seem to be up to my elbows in something’s internal organs, curing things, or deep frying unappetising sounding things to see what they taste like (pigs ear pork scratchings, anyone?)

I also have two new loves in my life:  A little rabbit called David Steele who was super cute a couple of weeks ago, but is now able to jump onto any surface and poop on it.  He’s answering back, smoking fags, demanding money, refusing to keep his cage tidy, ripping up the carpet, swearing and generally on his way to becoming a difficult teenager…  And Juliet, the most beautiful bike I have ever seen.  I think I probably look really really cool when I am riding her around.  I was stopped in the street the other week and asked if she could be used as a prop for a photoshoot  for a new cookery book which I can’t wait to get my hands on.  It was a sort of victoriana macaroon dream world.  If David Steele wasn’t so likely to have a heart attack I would probably spend all my time cruising with Juliet around North London with him in the basket.

Anyway, the weather’s been glorious, all my favourite foods are coming into season, and it’s time to give my life a bit of a spring clean, starting with getting my brain and motivation in order.

What better way to start than with brain food?

Smoked Mackerel Pate with Soda Bread, Watercress and Truffle Oil

Many years ago I used to go out with a boy whose dad was a baker – a proper old school Irish one.  It was at his house that I first discovered soda bread.  We would crawl back after a night out and eat toasted soda bread with butter and huge chunks of mature cheddar.  Since then I have tried in vain to find soda bread as good as his, and to recreate it for myself, but have failed on all counts.

A couple of months ago by complete chance, I got talking to the cousin of the owner of the pub where I work, who was out in the yard smoking mackerel in a makeshift barrel smoker.  He was smoking the fish for a party and was going to serve it on slices of home made soda bread.  He talked me through his recipe and IT WORKED!  It still needs a few tweaks and exact measurements to make it as good as the soda bread of my dreams, but it is damn good, damn easy, and the secret is spelt flour.

Tom’s Soda Bread

Ingredients:

1 lb wholemeal spelt flour (the bread pictured above is lighter than you would expect because I didn’t have enough wholemeal spelt and ended up having to top up with a bit of white bread flour)

1 level tsp bicarbonate of soda – this is really important and baking powder just won’t work

1/2 tsp salt

1 small pot live yoghurt loosened with 2 tbsp milk (you will not use all of it)

Method:

1. Preheat oven to high (about 220c works well for me but it depends on your oven)
2. Sift flour, salt and bicarb into a large bowl.  Make a well in the centre.
3. Add the loosened yoghurt a little at a time, mixing in with a palette knife and then using your hands, until you have a firm but stickyish dough.  You definitely won’t need to use the whole pot, but I find that the amount I use varies massively.  This is why baking can be such a bitch – sometimes it all depends on the weather conditions.
4. Knead the dough for a few minutes until it’s really pliable, then roll into a large ball, cut a cross in the top and place on a floured tray into the preheated oven.
5. Cook for about half an hour, until the bread is golden brown, and knocking on the bottom of the loaf makes a hollow sound.  Allow to cool slightly if you can.

Mackerel Pate

This is incredibly easy to make, and is delicious, fresh and healthy.  I like to smoke my own mackerel fillets using my amazing stovetop smoker, and highly recommend it – it is nothing like what you buy from the supermarket – the smokey taste is more complex and the fish more tender, however after a spate of smoking things I am out of wood chips and the supermarket stuff is nice – just not incredible!

Anyway, this recipe is one of those ones in which you can freestyle and add stuff according to your personal taste.

What I used:

Smoked mackerel fillets – I got the plain ones, stripped the meat off the skin into a mixing bowl using my hands, shredded it with my fingers, and tried to get all the little stray bones out.

Low-fat creme fraiche – I used a few tablespoons of it, mixing it in little by little until it was the consistency I wanted.  Some people like it really smooth and creamy, but I prefer to use just enough to bring everything together.

Lemon juice to taste

Horseradish – this is optional but I put in a teeny bit to add a bit of oomph.  I reckon this pate would work amazingly if you fusioned it up with wasabi, creme fraiche, coriander and lime.

Maldon salt and cracked black pepper – again keep tasting it: some mackerel might be quite salty already or might have that peppercorn crust, so you might not need to season at all.

Freshly chopped herbs – I would usually use dill but had run out, so I mixed in a bit of curly parsley, a teeny bit of tarragon, and some chives.  It was awesome!

Mix it all together and keep tasting and adjusting levels of seasoning until you come up with something magical.

To assemble 

I sliced up the soda bread and cut into bite-size pieces, spooned some of the pate on top, piled high with beautiful fresh watercress tops and added a couple of drops of white truffle oil because truffle oil is “da bomb”.

This makes a really incredible snack or canape and obviously it makes you more intelligent because of all the omega oils in the mackerel.  I am going to feed it to John until he becomes a walking encyclopedia.

Breakfast of Champions

The boy’s been doing really well with his gruelling gym sessions – he has a personal trainer who is killing him, so he comes back with a limp after every session.  The dieting is going fairly well too, although he often has secret chocolate wrappers in his pockets.

One of the first and most succesful things I implemented in his new diet are yoghurt breakfast pots.  A mixture of fat-free Greek yoghurt, granola, manuka honey for the vocal chords, seeds and fresh fruit that is often wildy out of season and scores very badly on the food miles front.  He really enjoys them, and usually makes up about 3 from a large-ish pot of yoghurt so that he has enough for a few days.

I made this pretty little thing to start with.  Behold:

 

And then his evil competitive streak came out and he decided we should compete to make the prettiest one.

So here is his effort:

He’s gone for crushed raspberries, yoghurt honey layer, blueberries, more yoghurt, oozing honey, strawberries, granola topping and some cheeky dark chocolate shavings in a martini glass.

I tried to outdo him but I don’t think it worked:

Mine is also a crushed raspberry base, but on more of a banana vibe, with cocoa nibs for an energising chocolate buzz without any of the fat.   I sort of had a banoffee pie in mind.

John is a vicious little bugger when he wants to be.  He ate all of his creation and then put mine in the door compartment of the fridge to eat the next day – or so he said.  Obviously the next time he opened the fridge (about 10 minutes later), my beautiful creation fell out and smashed into a million pieces on the kitchen floor.  And I swear he did it on purpose.

John 1 – 0 Rebecca

Hello My Name is Doctor Tom Yum

Howdy Pardners!

I was coming down with a nasty cold the other day, and knew that the only way to deal with this was to summon up the magical healing powers of the Thai doctor.  The only thing that could save me was tom yum soup.  Unfortunately I had never made it before, and was completely winging it, but it worked really well, and after 2 doses of this super sour and spicy soup and a lot of tv and napping, I was miraculously cured.

This recipe was completely made up by me, and was based purely on what I could find in the shops around me, so I am not saying that it’s at all authentic, but it really hit the spot.  I’m hoping my Thai friend Anya will one day give me a proper recipe.  Oh, and I added noodles because I just wanted the carbs. It’s almost like a mix between a Malaysian Laksa soup with all the noodles and garnish and stuff, and a Tom Yum soup. Fusion, innit.

It’s really vital to get hold of fresh prawns with shells and heads because this is where the incredible stock comes from.  I am very lucky to be living in this part of North London.  I have several really decent fishmongers around me who really know their stuff.  One of them is a Turkish dude who knows the names of everything he stocks in Cantonese because he has so many Chinese punters.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he speaks more Cantonese than I do.  He gave me some free baby monkfish the other day when I went to buy loads of squid, which were insanely good, fresh and really tender.  The lady I bought the prawns from is a matronly Mauritian lady who runs a really beautiful shop with a stunning array of seafood, and she also runs the Mauritian seafood restaurant next door, so she and her staff always have exciting recipe ideas.  I am glad I went to her because she also sells things like galangal, which I needed for this recipe.

Anyway, behold its beauty because even looking back at it now makes me feel healthy…

And here’s the money shot:

Again, apologies for the substandard photgraphy.  My camera has broken and I have had to rely on John’s iPhone to document everything these days – not that I was the food bloggers answer to David Bailey before I was so camera deprived.

So the recipe is as follows, and I have given it a catchy title, don’t you think?:

Mademoiselle Rebexquoi’s Half-Asian Super Pimpin’ Tom Yum Soup

Ingredients for 2 portions

About 10 really beautiful as large as you can get raw king prawns, heads and shells on

2 cloves garlic

4 stalks of lemongrass, outer layer removed, white part thinly sliced – keep the rest though.  I used it too.

2 inch knob of galangal, thinly sliced.  If you can’t get hold of this, try ginger, but it won’t be as good.

1-2 really hot bird’s eye chillies, thinly sliced, deseeded if you prefer something more mild

1 tbsp light brown sugar.  I would normally use palm sugar, but this is not so easy to get hold of.

A couple of glugs fish sauce

Juice of 1 lime, or extra to taste

Chinese fishcake thinly sliced because I love it so

Noodles if you really want to bastardise the heck out of it

Garnishes – I used sliced spring onions, sliced cucumber, lime wedges, beansprouts, crunchy fried garlic flakes, more chilli, (would have used Thai basil if I could have found some)

Directions

1. Decapitate and de-shell the prawns.  Keep the shells.  Keep the prawns too

2. Place the shells and garlic in a large saucepan with about a teaspoon of smoking oil.  Fry them, stirring often until they turn bright pink.  I also like to squish the shells and head a bit with the stirring device to let all the mad stuff come out of the heads.  Enjoy the awesome seafood smells.

3. Take the lemongrass pieces you would normally discard – ie. anything that is greenish in colour and quite obviously fibrous.  Using the back of a heavy knive, crush or bruise it a few times.  Although you can’t eat them, they release loads more oils and extra flavour.

4. Add about a litre of water, the galangal and the bruised lemongrass stalks, bring to the boil, then simmer.  Let it reduce down to as little as you need for 2 bowls of soup to get maximum flavour into the stock.

5. Pass your stock through a sieve or colander into a smaller pan to remove the shells and stuff.  You are left with the soup.

6. Place back on the heat, and add the chopped lemongrass bits and the chilli.  Bring to the boil and add the fish sauce and lime juice to taste.  I added the fishcake slices at this point too, then the noodles, and took off the heat.

7. In a smoking hot oiled frying pan, I chucked in the prawns and a squeeze of lime juice, and fried them until they turned pink and caramelised slightly.  I think for the normal recipe you would just throw the prawns into the boiling soup, but I  had already destroyed the authentic Thai-ness of the dish and thought it would add another level of flavour to the dish.

8.  Throw everything together into a bowl, add the garnish, and let the healing begin.  It should be super hot, super sour, deeply seafoody, with sweetness from the prawns, crunchiness from the veg, and completely worth the time it took to cook.

I don’t know why I was reminded of this video, but I wanted to share it.  I had a bit of an obsession with axolotls, and a Japanese girl sent me a cartoon from her childhood.  It is incredible.  After the soup, I kind of felt like Uparuppa.

So if you feel like you are coming down with something yucky, but still have the ability to haul ass out to the shops and do an hour of cooking, I would definitely ditch the Lemsip and try this instead.

Honeycomb Alchemy

There’s a whole lot of cooking going on in the Cooked Senseless kitchen these days…

I’ve been trying to master honeycomb for some time now, and admit that I am still trying to find the perfect formula.  This is the closest I have got.  I think honeycomb is just about the most funnest thing to cook because of the mad reaction that occurs when you tip the bicarb into the molten sugar mix.  I know funnest is not a real word, pedants.

John was eager to make them into mini Crunchie bars, so we headed out at midnight in search of a 24 hour shop to buy chocolate.

I was really pleased with the results.  I am posting this recipe for my sister who lives in Switzerland and probably misses Crunchie bars more than any other fine British delicacy.

My most successful attempt at honeycomb to date

Ingredients:

100g caster sugar

2 forkfuls of golden syrup – I read about this slightly odd method somewhere I can’t remember, and it’s a really good way of measuring the syrup (just stick the fork in, twirl as much syrup as you can onto the fork, and allow to drip off onto the sugar)

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Method:

• Melt the sugar and syrup in a large-ish saucepan over a medium heat.  Stir gently every so often to ensure that the sugar dissolves evenly and doesn’t catch.
• After about 10 minutes, it should reach the hard crack stage, about 160c.  This can be tested by dropping a small amount of the sugar into a cup of really cold water.  The sugar should form a hard ball which is not at all malleable.
• Take off the heat, stir in the bicarb, and watch the magic bubbling molten madness happen.  It’s witchcraft I tell thee!
• Immediately transfer to a small tray lined with greaseproof paper.  Don’t bother spreading it or you will end up with really thin honeycomb.  Instead let it become a blob and accept that it won’t be a beautifully even Crunchie shape.  More like gold nuggets.
• Allow to cool and set hard, so the surface is smooth and not tacky.  This will probably take a couple of hours in t’fridge.
• Once set, break into pieces.
• Try to wash saucepan.  Give up and turn to drink.  Throw pan over railway bridge.
• You can then dip your honeycomb into melted chocolate and allow to dry again, crumble it over ice cream in some sort of mad knickerbocker glory experiment, or even just eat it as it is until your teeth ache and you are bouncing off the walls.

I leave you with the Sugarhill Gang – a bunch of delightful rappers who are so named because they live with their gang in a luxury gingerbread penthouse perched on top of a man-made chocolate covered honeycomb hill.  Celebrities can be so flamboyant.